The Aspen Center for Physics is wonderful place. Unlike many physicists, I’m not a big skier, or a hiker, preferring to get my exercise through ball sports and in the gym, and so I don’t love Aspen in the way that many people do. But I do really like the Center, and I always have great physics conversations there, learn a lot, and am able to actually get work done. So I had been looking forward to our workshop for a while, and I wasn’t disappointed at all.

The conference spanned five days. We flew in on Sunday in time to register and have dinner, and then got started properly on the Monday morning. At many conferences, academic and otherwise, the day is full of sessions, and then the evenings are free. At Aspen, in the winter, this is modified somewhat, with the mornings, late afternoons and evenings full of sessions, and the middle part of the day free so that people can ski if they want to. We spend the same amount of time working as at a regular conference, but the time is just distributed differently. This last week, it was good that I don’t ski, since I had let a number of important deadlines slip to the point that I had to work each afternoon. I did have a great view while I was doing it though!

Our speakers covered a wide range of topics, experimental, observational and theoretical, covering dark matter and cosmic acceleration separately, as well as the possible interactions between them. I can’t possibly discuss all of the topic or talks here (but you can take a look at a slightly outdated program), but let me pick out one talk that particularly caught my attention, and one event.

The first morning we kicked off with a very nice talk by Doug Finkbeiner (Harvard), discussing his (and others’) recent work constructing a particle physics model of dark matter that is designed to account for the PAMELA and ATIC results. This was followed by later theoretical talks on related topics by Dan Hooper and Graham Kribs.The PAMELA results were a recurring theme at the workshop, and there were plenty of discussions in the free time and over dinner about the results themselves, their interpretation, and the models that a number of groups have constructed.

One talk that I particularly enjoyed was by Greg Tarle (Michigan), who gave an (originally unplanned) talk on the immense challenge of making the precise measurements that these quite beautiful experiments claim. From my perspective what was wonderful about Greg’s talk was that although he presented quite a few experimental details in the latter half, he constructed the first half in such a way as to get across some of the key things for theorists to keep in mind while they are rightfully getting excited by the data.

What I took away from it (although any mistakes here are naturally due to me, and not to Greg) is that, as we’ve discussed before, the big deal for PAMELA (and the earlier HEAT experiment) is an accurate measurement of the flux of cosmic ray positrons. The single largest challenge in measuring these is discriminating against the vast proton background, since protons have the same charge as positrons and are copious in cosmic rays. Ideally one needs to be able to reject the proton signal at the 10-6 level. If this is done completely reliably and the dramatic rise of the spectrum at high energies persists, then we may indeed be seeing a signature of dark matter annihilation, or something more mundane, like nearby pulsars.

On the other hand, it is possible that the signal is due to protons leaking in. Obviously, the key to figuring this out is particle identification. One point of caution Greg pointed out is that on PAMELA, the particle ID is solely dependent on calorimetry. Greg certainly wasn’t saying that he believes that the PAMELA signal is contaminated, but he did want to point out how a possible contamination might lead to an erroneous result. In his talk, to demonstrate this, he showed how to reproduce the observed effect (at high energies) with a model of proton contamination at the 3×10-4 level. Note though, that PAMELA claims proton rejection at the 10-5 level, but one can at least get a simple idea of what a small error might yield. Again, I as a theorist can’t comment on this at all, and my understanding is that the PAMELA experiment is an excellent one. Still, it is nice to have a feeling for the possible issues involved. All should be settled by FERMI (GLAST) hopefully.

On the Tuesday evening we had a couple of public events as part of the workshop. In the first, Dan Hooper, particle phenomenologist, dark matter expert and author extraordinaire, teamed up with me to conduct a Physics Cafe in the mezzanine of the Wheeler Opera House. I’m awful at estimating numbers, but I’d say somewhere between fifty and a hundred people, members of the public who either live in or were visiting Aspen, turned up to ask us any kinds of questions they liked about particle physics and cosmology. This was terrific fun, and we got some wonderful questions, my personal favorite of which was “What does entropy have to do with gravity?” Not something to which one can give a full answer (in public or professionally), but a great chance to talk about the general issues that gravity raises for thermodynamics.

I participate in a lot of events like these, and one thing that never ceases to surprise me is the general perception that scientists treat theories like general relativity as received wisdom, about which one should not ask questions. Dan and I had to go out of our way to explain that science is, in fact, about challenging ideas, and forcing them to stand up to evidence and scrutiny. This is not the fault of the audience, of course, but reflects the way in which I think science is often taught and portrayed.

Thanks for the nice summary, Mark. Are the slides going (/can be) to be posted online?
Thanks
shantanu

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/mark/ Mark

We’re working on it Shantenu (but to be honest, it might take a little time).

Metre

Mark,

Wish I had been able to come to the public session. A question I would have asked as a layman is what it would take to determine if dark matter really exists versus modifying gravity. I know a number of attempts to explain the data by modifying gravity theory (vice positing the existence of dark matter) have been made. Obviously detecting dark matter directly in the LHC would settle the matter, but what if LHC and other on-going experiments don’t detect dark matter?

Thanks for the link. The modified gravity crowd also thinks they can explain the bullet cluster data w/o the need for dark matter, so I don’t think the issue’s been decided yet. As a layman, I don’t have stake in either side of the argument, but am interested in how the cosmology community will go about determining which is correct.

Shantanu

Metre, the real smoking gun evidence for dark matter would come from multiple methods such as direct dark matter detection from various experiments, indirect detection (for which there are many hints), production at LHC etc.
Also, see this for a proposed smoking gun test for modified gravity vs dark matter using gravitational wave observations.

http://http Moshe

On the completely frivolous side, may I suggest a moratorium on dark puns? (esp. ones referring the Star Wars) as I tell my daughter, it’s only funny the first ten thousand times…

Sounds like good fun though, I personally like Aspen better in summer, but like you I don’t ski.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/mark/ Mark

You’ve got it Moshe, as soon as I get a signed agreement that nothing else gets the prefix “super-” By the way, I will be in Vancouver next week for a couple of evenings – are you around?

http://diracseashore.wordpress.com/ moshe

Good point, lack of imagination goes a long way, now we can count down the seconds till something superdark appears somewhere…

Yeah, I’m around (for a change), would be great to meet up, let’s coordinate via more private channels.

Sili

Haven’t we already had “superdark”? Or did those people people making the blackest material known to man call it something else?

Are there any plans to send an ATLAS detector (only smaller, of course) into Space? Sounds to this layman like an allround detector all the way up there might be a nifty thing to have.

eddie

On the received wisdom thing: I only realised after completing high school that it was OK to question the established science.
Of course, how else is progress made? But you need the basics to step forward from.
This, I think is the great failing off high school: that those who do best do so by receiving best the received.

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Cosmic Variance

Random samplings from a universe of ideas.

About Mark Trodden

Mark Trodden holds the Fay R. and Eugene L. Langberg Endowed Chair in Physics and is co-director of the Center for Particle Cosmology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a theoretical physicist working on particle physics and gravity— in particular on the roles they play in the evolution and structure of the universe. When asked for a short phrase to describe his research area, he says he is a particle cosmologist.